I brightened up over the The Final Reckoning part of the new Mission: Impossible title, figuring if it really is the final reckoning, we all have something to celebrate. After all, retirements are happy occasions.
And Tom Cruise is finally showing his age a wee bit, looking in certain shots as if his face had puffed up like a Pillsbury crescent roll and in others as if it had melted slightly like ice cream. Though of course the body remains ripped, and Cruise always has his shirt torn off in fight scenes to prove it. The whole Mission: Impossible franchise that kicked off in 1996 is very long in the tooth by now. I had a brief, admittedly delusional hope that it could be exciting again if all the main characters die in the end because that last mission to save the world really did turn out to be impossible.
But in the end of this sequel, it’s clear that this doesn’t have to be the final reckoning at all. And given the enormous profits — along with the hit Lilo & Stitch live-action remake, Mission: Impossible 2025 has made this Memorial Day weekend the biggest box-office haul in history — there will always be somebody in Hollywood with a new idea for a sequel.
So I was disappointed and bored as hell by writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s latest entry in the series. He’s on his fourth, out of a total of eight films, and this one is almost three hours long. The first hour is a slurry of incoherent flashbacks to catch you up on all that’s happened in the franchise, as if you cared. Does anyone really want these massive plot dumps impeding the lumbering progress of the rote narrative, or the elaborate explanations of the latest world-destroying doohickeys? Whatever the high-tech gadgetry, the unkillable Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is going to wind up hanging off the underside of an airplane in flight, right? So let’s literally cut to the chase.
My “meh” reaction, however, was countered in the theater by the two middle-aged…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
